Macedonian charged in U.S. with selling card data pleads guilty

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Macedonian citizen charged in the United States with operating a website called Codeshop that authorities say was used to sell stolen credit card data pleaded guilty on Friday, U.S. prosecutors said.

Djevair Ametovski, 30, pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft in Brooklyn federal court, according to prosecutors. He faces up to 17 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Lawyers for Ametovski could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ametovski, who prosecutors say was known online as “codeshop,” “sindrom” and “sindromx,” was arrested in Slovenia in 2014 and extradited to New York last year.

The charges against him stemmed from what U.S. authorities said was a seven-year investigation undertaken to combat cyber marketplaces for stolen financial information.

Prosecutors said that from 2010 to 2014, Ametovski ran a “carding shop” online that obtained and sold data for more than 181,000 compromised credit and debit cards, causing millions of dollars in losses for thousands of victims.

Ametovski got the data from hackers, who stole it from financial institutions and other businesses, using a series of online money exchangers and digital currencies to pay them.

Users who bought data on Codeshop used it generally to make online purchases and to encode plastic cards that could be used to withdraw cash at ATMs, prosecutors said. The site allowed them to search stolen data by bank identification number, financial institution, country state and card brand to find exactly what they wanted to buy, according to prosecutors.